Wearing long, beautiful acrylic nails has its benefits and challenges. On the one hand, your nails look impeccable for a while. But sometimes your schedule becomes too tight to keep up with maintaining fake nails and other times your budget won’t support the cost of them. And when you want to take off the acrylic nails, it’s not easily accomplished. The danger is that you will seriously damage your real nails, and the frustration is that your natural nails may look shabby for a while.

A professional nail salon can help with removal of your acrylic nails while providing a relaxing and/or engaging environment, but you can do it at home. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

The process of removing acrylic nails is somewhat lengthy. Find a good place at a table to get comfortable for a while. Protect the table’s surface with plastic, such as a large garbage bag, and enough newspaper to effectively soak up spills while also preventing the possibility of damage to the table.

Clip the acrylic nails to as short a length as possible using nail clippers. This will simplify the process of removing them.

Pour acetone nail polish remover into a glass bowl for the purpose of soaking your nails. The soaking process helps to dissolve the nail glue between your natural nail and the acrylic overlay.

Before dipping your fingers into the polish remover, apply a good coating of petroleum jelly onto the skin all around the nails and as far up as your finger will soak in the chemical solution. The petroleum jelly will help to protect your skin from drying out.

Soak your fingers in the bowl of nail polish remover for 15 to 20 minutes.

After soaking, gently peel the acrylic nails off, if you can. If you still find that there is resistance, meaning that the acrylic nails don’t easily come off, soak for another few minutes. Don’t ever force an acrylic nail off, since doing so could badly damage your natural nails.

After the acrylic nails are removed, take good care of your natural nails to strengthen them and get them back into a healthy state. By the way, economy of time or money aren’t the only reasons to remove acrylic nails. In order to prevent long-term damage to your natural nails, it’s best to routinely take a break from using fake nails.